Can anyone save the BBC from itself?
The cuts to Newsnight are a symptom of a broadcaster increasingly devoted to unchallenging content.
There are no reports yet of mass protests outside New Broadcasting House. The cuts being made to BBC Two’s former flagship programme Newsnight are deep, with half of its 57 staff – including its dedicated reporting team – set to lose their jobs. But the relatively sanguine response from the public confirms the BBC management view that the programme isn’t what it was when Jeremy Paxman was at his peak and when agenda-setting stories began there. It has lost saliency in the noisy digital world, and its audience has dwindled. Television and radio programmes come and go, and the twist of fate for Newsnight is that it will endure in a shortened form, stripped of resources, as a ghost of ...
Henry Kissinger’s real triumph
The former diplomat, who has died at age 100, profited for decades by telling clients what they wanted to hear.
Editor's Note: This piece was first published in May 2023 at the time of Henry Kissinger's 100th birthday. It has been updated to reflect that the former US secretary of state died on 29 November 2023 at his home in Connecticut. The centenary of Henry Kissinger, hailed as a genius or decried as a war criminal with equal fervour, unfolded on 27 May in a who’s who of hagiographic tweets, interviews and op-eds from across the establishment, culminating in a gala dinner at the fusty Yale Club in New York. Such commentators almost entirely avoided the real story about Kissinger, who last held office 46 years ago. This is a pity because Kissinger – a less impressive US national security adviser ...
PMQs today: Rishi Sunak panics as he brands the EU the enemy
Sunak’s suggestion that Keir Starmer was “backing an EU country over Britain” by meeting the Greek Prime Minister was astonishingly petulant.
Everyone knew what the main topics were going to be at today’s PMQs. The only question was whether Keir Starmer would lead on last week’s net migration figures, which showed numbers reached a record 745,000 in 2022, or Rishi Sunak’s decision to snub the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, over the return of the Parthenon marbles. The Labour leader chose both. In a fiery PMQs session peppered with even more vicious jokes than usual, Starmer kicked off his first question about immigration numbers by alluding to the marbles row, accusing Sunak of spending “this week arguing about an ancient relic of little interest to the public – but that’s enough about the Tory party!” The rest of his questions aimed to draw ...
Andy Burnham: Labour must break its silence on tax rises
The Greater Manchester mayor told a New Statesman conference that his party should back measures such as a land value tax.
Andy Burnham has raised the prospect of new local taxes to pay for infrastructure and social care if a Labour government is elected. Speaking in conversation with Andrew Marr at the New Statesman's Path to Power conference today (28 November), the mayor of Greater Manchester warned that public spending pressures after 13 years of Conservative government meant Labour “won’t be able not to raise the issue of tax”. To date, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have only promised limited tax rises, such as the abolition of non-domicile tax status and the addition of VAT to private school fees. However, Burnham emphasised that tax increases should not automatically be viewed as unpopular, arguing that “the public are ready to be given a ...
Rishi Sunak’s political strategy gets weirder
Why has the Prime Minister cancelled a meeting with his Greek counterpart over the Parthenon marbles?
He cavorted on stage with Elon Musk. But he will not meet the Greek prime minister. Rishi Sunak is so peeved by Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s uppity comments about the Parthenon marbles at the British Museum that he cancelled today’s lunchtime meeting. It’s as if, Mitsotakis said, half the Mona Lisa was in London and the other half in the Louvre. Fixing Britain’s broken relations with the Europeans was supposed to be Sunak’s forte. Mitsotakis even went to Stanford and spent time at McKinsey. The diplomacy was ripe. Instead, talks on migration, security and cooperation have not happened and the snubbed Greek PM has gone home. Back in 2012, Stephen Fry reportedly said we should return the “marbles as a gesture of solidarity ...
Where is Labour’s economic imagination?
The party is struggling to break out of the Tory fiscal straitjacket.
If Labour wins the next general election, it will inherit not just an economy in the doldrums but also a fiscal straitjacket designed to perpetuate the old orthodoxy of “sound money”. Sluggish growth, flatlining productivity, low business and public investment, as well as “the largest reduction in real living standards” since the 1950s, as the Office for Budget Responsibility reported alongside last week’s Autumn Statement. The Tories’ pre-election tax cuts, which Labour won’t reverse, will be paid for by post-election spending cuts. While health and education appear to be ring-fenced, other departmental budgets face unrealistic, real per-person reductions of about 15 per cent – worse than austerity after 2010. And to make the sums add up, central government will reduce capital ...
Why are voters so relaxed about record immigration?
As long as the cost of living dominates, immigration will not regain its previous political status.
Why is Labour’s poll lead so stubborn? Normally by this point of the parliamentary cycle there has been some movement back towards the governing party. But the numbers – a Labour lead of between 17 and 20 percentage points – still point to a landslide defeat for the Conservatives. One of the reasons is how divorced the Tories sometimes appear from the issues that matter most to voters. Among the subjects that dominated the Conservative Party conference in October were immigration, trans rights and the scrapping of HS2’s northern arm. Anyone can work out what the strategy is here. The focus on immigration, in particular “small boats”, is an attempt to draw attention away from the cost of living. The focus ...
Doctor Who has always been political
Right-wingers may whine about “woke” storylines now, but in the 1970s a communist was writing scripts about imperialism.
The usual suspects have been whining for quite some time. “Doctor Who fans fume and brand show ‘woke’,” the Mail screamed last Monday, after last week’s Children in Need sketch gave us a version of Davros, creator of the Daleks, who still had use of his legs. “Doctor Who has degenerated into a right-on lecture,” a writer for Spiked complained in April. Just a few weeks ago, Tim Stanley, the right-wing commentator who once wrote the show’s obituary for the Catholic Herald (“RIP Doctor Who, 1963-2017”) after the Doctor regenerated into a woman, laid out his stall on Newsnight. “Doctor Who, like the BBC, has always reflected the philosophy, the values, of the establishment of its time,” he said. “In ...